Book Review: Tai Pei, by Tao Lin

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As you read Tao Lin’s latest novel, Taipei (Vintage
Contemporaries, 250 pages, $14.95, ), you will know when a character
leaves to go to the bathroom. You will know when a character goes to
Urban Outfitters. You will know what a character buys at Whole Foods
Market—kale, lemons and energy drinks. Such details make Taipei a lot like a pointillist painting where dots seemingly meaningless up close become a picture from afar.

That picture isn’t so
pretty. We follow Paul, a socially awkward writer living in New York
City, through a blur of parties, Google Chat, almost-relationships and
steadily increasing drug use. Amid Adderall- and Klonopin-induced hazes
(or, sometimes, cocaine- and heroin-induced hazes), he constantly
refreshes his Tumblr feed, goes on book tours, visits his parents in
Taipei and, in Las Vegas, weds another writer, Erin, on a whim.

The little dots end
up creating a portrait of a twentysomething strung out on technology and
drugs, leaving little room to care about much of anything. That
includes, but is not limited to, his wedding and marriage, his impending
death and people in general, whom he sees as “vaguely, unsatisfactorily
desirable.”

The sentence
structure adopts the self-conscious staccato of internal thought,
jumping from how beautiful life can be to “let’s get drunk” in no time
at all, which makes Paul’s hazy world feel all the more real. Lin’s
prose is sometimes bogged down by too many thoughts and
details—sentences often stretch into the Faulkner-esque—making it hard
to keep track of time or people. But while the language and Paul’s
numbness cause the story to start flat, the writing eventually pops to
life in surprising and weird ways.

Lin, the author of several other novels, including Shoplifting From American Apparel and Richard Yates, has said that Taipei is autobiographical fiction. The events in Taipei
aren’t really what it’s about, though. It’s more a depressing and
analytical look into a character’s thoughts as he struggles to express
himself in a too-busy world.